In the prior art, it is known to manage I/O requests from clients to data stored in units of blocks on storage devices of a storage apparatus based on a metadata tree structure including a root node directly or indirectly pointing to blocks e.g. via indirect nodes pointing to direct nodes and via direct nodes pointing to blocks of data, e.g. in connection with a log write method which writes modified data to newly allocated blocks.
Below, some potential objects are described. Exemplary embodiments and aspects as described in the following may be proposed to solve one, more or all of the below objects.
It is an object of the present invention to provide aspects in a data storage system in which a cluster system of plural node apparatuses is enabled to efficiently and reliably manage I/O access to one or more data objects distributed across a plurality of node apparatuses and is, at the same time, enabled to efficiently and reliably utilize available storage space in the distribution of data across one or more node apparatuses, including increased storage efficiency by way of data compression techniques.
It is an object of the present invention to provide aspects in a data storage system, which provides an efficient and reliable scale-out approach in which a cluster system of plural node apparatuses is enabled to efficiently and reliably manage I/O access to one or more data objects distributed across a plurality of node apparatuses and is, at the same time, enabled to efficiently and reliably utilize available storage space in the distribution of data across one or more node apparatuses, including increased storage efficiency by way of data compression techniques.
It is another object of the present invention to provide aspects in a data storage system, which allows to efficiently and reliably manage the I/O access independent of data location in the cluster system enabled to perform data compression of data across one or more node apparatuses.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide aspects in a data storage system, which allows to efficiently and reliably allow for rebalancing and redistributing of data across node apparatuses of the cluster system by being, at the same time, enabled to perform data compression of data across one or more node apparatuses.